Disney Attempted To Buy $7.9B Action Franchise Before Amazon

✓ Correct! Steamboat Willie. Mickey actually finished production first on the silent short Plane Crazy earlier that year, but Walt and his brother Roy bet the studio’s entire future on retooling Steamboat Willie with synchronised sound — a brand-new technology that had only just appeared with The Jazz Singer (1927). The gamble worked: Steamboat Willie’s November 1928 release made Mickey an instant national icon and put Disney on the map. The short entered the public domain in January 2024, exactly 95 years after release.

✗ Wrong. The answer is Steamboat Willie. Plane Crazy was actually animated first (May 1928, silent) but didn’t find a distributor. The Gallopin’ Gaucho was the second Mickey short, also originally silent. The Karnival Kid (1929) is where Mickey first speaks. The breakthrough — the first publicly released, sound-synchronised Mickey short — is Steamboat Willie.

✓ Correct! Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The 83-minute film cost $1.49 million — an enormous gamble at the height of the Depression — and grossed $8 million on its initial release, the highest-grossing sound film made up to that point. Walt won an honorary Oscar (one large statuette and seven small ones, presented by Shirley Temple). The film’s success funded the construction of Disney’s Burbank studio and effectively created the feature-animation industry.

✗ Wrong. The answer is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pinocchio (1940) is the second Disney feature. Fantasia (1940) is the third. Bambi (1942) is the fifth. Snow White was the bet-the-studio first — ridiculed in production as “Disney’s Folly” before becoming the highest-grossing sound film ever made up to 1937.

✓ Correct! July 17, 1955 — press preview day, dubbed “Black Sunday” in Disney company lore. ABC broadcast a live two-hour TV special featuring Ronald Reagan, Bob Cummings and Art Linkletter (collectively winging the script as things went wrong). Disneyland was built on Anaheim orange groves Walt mortgaged his home to fund. Walt Disney World opened in 1971 in Orlando, six years after Walt’s death — that’s the date many people confuse with Disneyland’s opening.

✗ Wrong. The answer is 1955 — specifically July 17. 1948 is when Walt first sketched the concept. 1962 doesn’t mark a major Disney park milestone. 1971 is when Walt Disney World opened in Florida (six years after Walt’s death) — that’s the date most often confused with Disneyland’s. The original Anaheim park opened in 1955.

✓ Correct! Hamlet. The internal pitch was famously “Bambi meets Hamlet” (or, in some retellings, “Hamlet with lions”): Mufasa is the murdered king-father (Hamlet Sr.), Scar is the usurping uncle (Claudius), Simba is the exiled prince (Hamlet), and even the ghost-on-a-cliff appearance plays out beat-for-beat. The Lion King grossed $968 million worldwide and remained the highest-grossing animated film for 16 years until Toy Story 3 broke the record in 2010.

✗ Wrong. The answer is Hamlet. Macbeth is the “ambitious wife pushes husband to murder the king” story (the closer Disney parallel there is the Frollo/Esmeralda dynamic in Hunchback). Othello is the jealousy tragedy. King Lear is the divided-kingdom tragedy. The Lion King’s bones are unambiguously Hamlet’s — ghost, uncle-murderer, exiled-prince and all.

✓ Correct! “Let It Go” — the Oscar-winning power ballad that fundamentally rewrote the film’s plot in production: Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez wrote the song so persuasively that the directors threw out the existing script and rewrote Elsa from villain to misunderstood protagonist. The song spent over 30 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, was translated into 41 languages for international releases, and its Idina Menzel single sold 10.9 million copies. Frozen grossed $1.28 billion and held the highest-grossing-animated-film record until its own 2019 sequel.

✗ Wrong. The answer is “Let It Go.” The other three options are also Frozen songs by the same Lopez/Anderson-Lopez writing team. “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” is the early childhood-montage number. “For the First Time in Forever” is Anna’s coronation-day song. “Love Is an Open Door” is the Hans/Anna duet. The Oscar-winning monster hit is “Let It Go.”

✓ Correct! Toy Story (November 22, 1995). Made for $30 million, it grossed $373 million worldwide and immediately rewrote what was possible in animation. Steve Jobs — who’d bought Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986 for $5 million — took the company public a week after the film’s release at $22 a share, instantly making him a billionaire. Disney bought Pixar outright in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock, making Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder. A Bug’s Life (1998) was the second Pixar feature; Monsters, Inc. (2001) the fourth.

✗ Wrong. The answer is Toy Story (1995). A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003) are all later Pixar features. Toy Story was the studio’s first — and the first fully computer-animated theatrical feature in cinema history. Its release a week before Steve Jobs took Pixar public effectively turned him from struggling NeXT-era founder into a billionaire.

✓ Correct! Marvel Entertainment, acquired August 2009 for $4 billion. The deal followed Marvel Studios’ first independent production (Iron Man, 2008) and gave Disney rights to over 5,000 characters — though crucially not Spider-Man (still under a Sony deal) or the X-Men/Fantastic Four (under Fox until the 2019 acquisition reunited them). Disney’s combined Marvel-Lucasfilm-Pixar-Fox portfolio is now the largest IP holding in entertainment history.

✗ Wrong. The answer is Marvel Entertainment. DC Entertainment is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (since the 1969 Kinney/National acquisition). Image Comics and Dark Horse remain independent. Disney bought Marvel in August 2009 for $4 billion, two years after Marvel Studios’ first self-financed film (Iron Man, 2008).

✓ Correct! Lin-Manuel Miranda — co-writing with Te Vaka frontman Opetaia Foa’i and composer Mark Mancina. Miranda’s Hamilton had opened on Broadway the year before (August 2015) and turned him into the rare Disney songwriter with crossover Broadway-rap credibility. Miranda has since become a Disney mainstay, returning for Encanto (2021), where his songs “Surface Pressure” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” topped the Billboard Hot 100.

✗ Wrong. The answer is Lin-Manuel Miranda. Stephen Sondheim wrote Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and West Side Story’s lyrics — but never a Disney animated feature. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Cats, Phantom and Evita — also never a Disney film. Alan Menken is the great Disney Renaissance composer (Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin) but didn’t write Moana’s songs. Moana is Miranda’s, with Foa’i and Mancina.